Friday Ephemera:

WROL in Salem has taken the risky step of hiring Boston Herald columnist reactionary Don Feder as a radio talk show host. I feel for the guy, buried as he is among such liberal progressive stalwarts as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Jay Severin, Don Imus, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Savage, "Doctor" Laura Schlesinger etc etc etc....
:)
I do wonder though, given the Warsaw-Pact level of political uniformity on the radio talk show circuit...is it theoretically possible to max-out the conservative listening audience?
In other words is there a finite limit to how much sheer partisan outrage you can inflict on a particular conservative cohort?
Back in the 1980's the nationally syndicated televangelists ran into this problem...they solved by going on a ruinous intermural jihad against each other desperate to rip off chunk change chunks of an opponent's audience.
Granted they were primarily doing fund-raising via worship, which is different than the partisan activism practiced by today's talks show tyranny.
Is too much easy pickin's a bad thing for the radio reactionary set?
I'm on the fence with this one...but the thought of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Ingraham in a to-the-death match for the domination of the AM dial is too delicious to pass up.

***
Late word has come to us that Michael Kelly, columnist for the Washington Post has been killed in an accident while covering the war in Iraq. Michael was a conventional op-ed righter in every way, but alone of the punditariat he had sufficient editorial fortitude to go see the fighting first hand.
This is in stark contrast to a veritable legion of pro-war writers and columnists in DC who have never and will never hear a shot fired in anger....

***

I, Romney-us Augustus...

So let me get this straight, Mitt Romney is still sticking with that "Liberty Tunnel" bullshit? It's a low churlish sort of insult to the memory of U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill-so nice to see the Governor is sticking to what he knows.
Oh Mitt has his story straight, he claims the "Liberty Tunnel" appellation honors our veterans-and this is a testing war of war and all that.
As if this insufferable draft dodger ever given two hoots in hell about the poor boys who get shipped off to Viet Nam in his place!
Poverty is still a chronic problem especially among the widows of Viet Nam vets and yet all Romney can come up with is a pricey hole in the ground.
Yup Tip O'Neill's memory will have to officially make do with some nowheresville connector to the Ted Williams Tunnel.
All that money he brought home to get the Big Dig started is forgotten now, ingratitude used to be a mortal sin in Bay State politics, now it's a vital prerequisite for higher office!
Well what can you expect from such a famously smug and self-righteous hammerhead?
This is what happens when 51% of the electorate thinks they are millionaires thanks to a dangerously inflated real estate market. You end up with grinning obnoxious onanists like Mitt Romney as Governor.
Sick
Demented
Typical

If it ain't Brokaw, then don't fix it...

The hardiness of our nation seems to have run out when a hopeless mediocrity Tom Brokaw is now considered the most trusted man in TeeVee news.
Maybe the citizenry likes an anchorman with an obvious disinterest in the copy that crawls up the teleprompter. Perhaps it's his priceless collection of baritonal glottal shocks that soothes in these troubled times.
No doubt his voice alone would earn him good pay as a move extra specializing in a "drunk routine" if the whole newsman thing went bust.
However, I prefer to think television journalistic standards have simply fallen to an abysmal level.
I concede that Tom is not a vulgar buffoon, nor is he neurotic wreck like Dan Rather...He is no Fox News propagandist either. His virtues are at best tepid negatives...that is the most you can say about him.
Because otherwise Tom is a complaisant, compliant, blandly self worshipping, overpaid and undertalented.
It's not that he has opinions it's just that his opinions can be safely discarded.
It speaks volumes about the changes in journalism big money has wrought when Brokaw had to cut short skin-diving in the Caribbean to cover the latest Space Shuttle disaster.
The most controversial thing about Brokaw is his unadulterated adolescent hero worship of our World War Two veterans. An entirely predictable unthreatening obsession that could easily be transferred to coal-miners or rodeo clowns if necessary.
But give him Brokaw due, he brown-nosed old John Chancellor, mixed the old anchorman's drinks up strong, and kowtowed his way to the top.
Now today, Tom Brokaw is the most trusted newsman in America...not that trust is a much honored item in post conservative civilization.
As values go trust is way behind vengefulness, greed, and reflexive pietism in the latest polls.
It's not that we trust that is such a dispiriting thing, trust is what keeps the remaining embers of the democratic spirit aflame.
No, it's that we trust Tom Brokaw...and what will he do with our trust?....sell books and lots of them.
Coming up in 2004 "The Greatest Generation Cookbook"...check out Marshal Zhukov's recipe for potato pancakes!
Have a real "Stalingrad Breakfast!"
:)
Sick
Demented
Typical...
JohnIAT@aol.com

Hatch Cachet

Does Senator Orrin Hatch have a frickin' shred of self respect left at this point?
My Ghod he was on Imus in the Morning today abasing himself before George Bush Junior in the most obnoxious manner possible.
It all but made me physically ill to listen to a U.S. Senator a member of the world's greatest deliberative body comport himself as little more than a courtier and a dishonest one at that.
Gore Vidal and Allen Drury lied to us my friends...in their respective novels Washington D.C. and Advise and Consent they depicted the U.S. Senate as a place where mighty law-makers clashed with the White House on all matters great and small. That is clearly NOT the case today as Orrin Hatch a Senate Insider if ever there was one fairly writhes on the floor in a compulsive bid to ingratiate at the mere mention of George Bush Junior's name.
Does this guy have any dignity left at all?
ANY??
Well we were warned about Orrin, back when he ran for President in 2000, one editorial wag suggested Hatch was in the race to get face-time with Bush via the debates to play up his Vice Presidential bona fides.
He didn't get the VP slot, but Bush was polite enough to pat him on the head and call Orrin a nice old dog all the same.
Now look at him, a querulous sycophantic buffoon....do the people of Utah realize what a gruesome specimen they've elected to the Senate?
You should've heard Hatch railing against the perfidious "armchair generals" that are "second guessing" this glorious fight in Iraq....never mind the fact the whole mishaugas was dreamed up by the coterie of armchair generals who surround his President. None of whom have ever heard a shot fired in anger.
And if it's not amateur strategists he's bitching about then it's the French, the Germans, and NATO that are causing all our problems.
For the record I'm sure we don't have to go far back in the congressional record to find tons of speechifying from Senator Hatch praising NATO and the western alliance as the world's hope for peace via strength.
Ah but that was then...and this is now, such is the zeitgeist under Tiberius Bush and his nonexistent attention span.
Oh and no one was expecting a short war sez Orrin anyone who did is plain stupid or naive.
Which is no more that the latest spin from out the White House, it's not enough to grovel these days, the President's supporters are supposed to lie on his behalf.
Lord what a plantation mentality we have in DC these days-it's appalling.
It's shameless flatterers like Orrin Hatch that are turning this nation into little more than a land fit for sterner men to loot.
Aren't Senator's supposed to have more pride in themselves and their institution than this????
He was yelping - yelping -yelping with that nasty high pitched voice of his through the whole call-in...gave me a headache.
The world is wrong and George Bush is right and always will be....doesn't the President have paid apologists on his staff to carry on in this gross and incontinent fashion?
I mean my Ghod Hatch could at least pretend to have a little independence!
No such luck, we are in deep shit indeed when the debate boils down to how just loud to shriek the President's praises on the public airwaves.
We are faced with a perfect storm in Washington my friends. The White is ruled by ambitious war loving chickenhawks, while Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court are reduced to little more than compliant cyphers.
James Madison once asserted that power is the only thing that constrains power...and where power is completely unconstrained we get the toadying likes of Senator Orrin Hatch making the laws.
Gruesome to think about isn't it?
Well with any luck you didn't have to listen to it.
Sick
Demented
Typical

Ralph'd and Regurgitated

How many thousand are going to have to die in the Middle East before Ralph Nader feels he has made his point?
And his point seems to be...
If the Greens can keep the Democrats out of the White House things will become so bad that the America citizenry will rise up in revolt, throw the GOP out, the Greens will become the new left-wing party with the rump of the dems to anchor the conservative-moderate side of the spectrum.
Got all that?
My thinking is, if the Greens keep the GOP in power long enough, conservatism will inevitably fail and fail hard thus setting the stage for a nonconservative violent authoritarian political movement to take over.
I plan to discuss this in detail with such Greens as I will be quartered with when we are all rounded up and sent to a labor camp in East Texas.
:)
It seems a particularly raw and unpleasant form of political masturbation infects Nader's thinking just as much as it is rampant among senior White House decisionmakers.
But that is just a guess on my part.

The Goldberg Variations, or the Sacred Dance of the Lummoxes
In these perilous times, with morning troubling all our hearts, with war abroad and uncertainty and suspicion here at home...let us take a moment to celebrate the triumphant return of Bill Goldberg to Professional Wrestling.
Yes that is right, Bill Goldberg, the gargantua himself is back!
At last progress is achieved in the war on terrorism...or at least the hedonistic terrorism practiced by that simpering punk, THE ROCK!

Yup, Bill is back bustin' heads with the W.W.E. and I for one could not be happier.
Oh I remember with the simplest nostalgia his reign as the now defunct W.C.W.'s champion behemoth...the punk acts would chase each other round the ring, the music would crash, and Bill Goldberg mightiest slab of meat on the planet would lumber out to sandbag the best the "sport" had to offer!
By Jesu the times we did see when Bill ruled the roost!
Alas it all went to smash, the W.C.W. got sold to the W.W.E. and Goldberg went off to parts unknown to wallow in his multi-million dollar ironclad contract.
But lo Bill is resurrected!
Now is the time,
This is the moment...it's a mere matter of crushing the Rock, marching over that aging fop, Hollywood Hulk Hogan, and the path to Supreme Power with the Heavyweight Championship is clear!
Now if we can only get Goldberg to endorse Senator Kerry then the pickin's will be easy indeed come 2004 my friends!
With him on our side we will take over the Kingdom of Heaven!
Goldberg hath returned!!
And we are all next!!!!

R.I.P. DPM

You had to land on page 11A in today's issue of USA Today to see a picture of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's funeral cortege as it left the Church yesterday.
One black and white photo with no accompanying article...
Possibly the excess of "war news" scaled back the coverage of the great man's final journey.
Or more than likely USA Today is edited by a pack of naive' hammerheads who have somehow internalized the notion that the rush to bad journalism is the only thing holding the nation together.
It's just the sort of institutional churlishness these hapless wetnoses would learn in college.
Be that as it may, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has gone to the throne of our savior, we shan't see his like again. Scholar, libertine, contrarian, all these pompous jackasses who infest Sunday morning chat shows can but WISH they were D.P.M.
He could've been President if he'd a played his cards right.
I suspect though, he gave the job a pass on the Gore Vidalian grounds that running for President is a process of burdensome debt incursion...even if you win big you owe too much to too many to do anything worthwhile.
Yup he's gone and the punditariat passes over his death in near silence, it's like they don't even pretend to care anymore.
Mike Barnicle (on the Imus Show) yesterday merely spun a yarn about periodically meeting Moynihan for breakfast at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square back in the 1970's. With a horrible little giggle Mike noted that Moynihan occasionally needed "beer for breakfast"....
I don't know what happened at the Wursthaus back in the day, but I do know that the excise laws of the Commonwealth are as strict for me as they are for Harvard Profs on their way to a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But why wax bitter about Mike's vulgarity? He is who he is...
However just you wait for the launch into eternity of Ronald Reagan, it'll be weeks of very stagy public breast beating and the rending of garments.
Barnicle will weep manly tears indeed...I can hear his sobs now.
I think Daniel Patrick Moynihan was worth one torn garment at the very least...he certainly did more for the country than Reagan.